Knowledge Work Is Already Over in America
Regulation looks like protection for knowledge work. Her argument is that it protects accountability, not the work itself, and those are very different things.
The path
She moved to the United States at twelve, after about a month of middle school in Korea. She finished her undergraduate degree and law school at Berkeley, studying political science and French, and also studied at Sciences Po in Paris, which is why she speaks French.
Twenty one years of legal practice followed, based in San Francisco. Then at forty seven she went to zero to one.
Why leave a profession that looks safe
Law is the canonical example of a job protected by regulation. Licensing, liability, and professional obligation form a wall that technology does not simply walk through.
Her argument is that the wall protects the wrong thing. What regulation protects is accountability, meaning someone a client can hold responsible. It does not protect the work itself. And a very large share of legal work is exactly the kind of reading, comparison, drafting, and summarization that models now do at speed.
So the profession survives while the job changes underneath it. Fewer people do more, entry level work thins out, and the value concentrates in judgment and in being the person who signs.
What that means for knowledge work generally
The reason this generalizes is that most knowledge work has the same shape. A large volume of structured production, wrapped in a thin layer of judgment and accountability.
The production layer is where the compression happens. The judgment layer is where the remaining value sits. That is not a comfortable finding for anyone whose value is mostly production.
Her own answer was to move rather than wait. Not because building a company is safer, but because being early to the shape of the new thing beats being late to the old one.
Photos from the event
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